People's Democracy

Penalise DIAL For Its Failure

CITU Secretary Demands From PM

Dipankar Mukherjee, CPI(M) ex-MP and secretary of CITU has sent the following letter to Dr Manmohan Singh, prime minister, on May 15, 2008 regarding the worse conditions prevailing at the Delhi airport.

Dear Dr Manmohan Singh ji,

I am constrained to invite to your kind attention to the observations of deputy chairman, Planning Commission, widely reported in the media about the chaotic conditions prevailing in Delhi Airport under the GMR-led consortium Delhi International Airport Ltd. (DIAL). As a matter of fact since privatisation and take over of Delhi Airport from Airports Authority of India (AAI) by DIAL in April 2006, passengers have been subjected to blitzkrieg PR campaign by DIAL on their so-called master plan to modernise airport, synchronised with matching deterioration of passenger amenities, traffic congestion and overall chaos, as observed by the deputy chairman, Planning Commission. His observation clearly indicts DIAL of gross violation of Operation, Management and Development Agreement (OMDA), through which Delhi Airport was privatised.

As per the agreement intermediate works like upgradation of general aesthetics of all existing terminals, improvement of passenger amenities and retail offerings and commissioning of rapid taxiway in the existing airside has to be completed by April, 2008. This time schedule was re-confirmed by DIAL before Parliamentary Consultative Committee in 2007. It also promised an interim domestic terminal by July 2008 to cater 10 million passengers and a new integrated terminal building with a capacity of 27 million passengers by 2010. All these commitments, as per the agreement have till now proved to be empty rhetoric and I regret to state that till date Government has not taken any action against DIAL and has been glossing over DIAL�s incompetence to stick to the time schedule as per the agreement on one plea or the other. As a matter of fact instead of punitive action against GMR for its failure to comply with OMDA, it has been rewarded with closure of AAI airport at Hyderabad to give their new airport at Shamshabad a free hand to exploit the air traffic in another metro city.

I am afraid the lack of action by the government on what deputy chairman aptly describes as �complete failure� of DIAL to upgrade Delhi airport, becomes more glaring in light of the offer made by AAI Employees Joint Forum, including the engineers, architects, professionals and other specialists to upgrade and modernise Delhi & Mumbai airport through an �alternative time-bound plan�. In a representation dated 18.06.2004 to you, they had proposed a MOU between Government, AAI and employees to complete the upgradation programme within a time schedule of 48 months from the date of approval of plan by Government, which means by this time the job of modernisation would have been over. Unfortunately this was spurned and airports privatised on the pretext of rapid upgradation of Delhi airport.

I therefore urge upon you to review performance of DIAL as per OMDA and take some penal steps in view of their dismal performance in upgradation of Delhi airport so far. I request you to consider one such step in this direction in the form of restoration of commercial operations of AAI airport at Hyderabad, so that total dependence on the consortium led by the same group to monopolise air traffic in Hyderabad in spite of their failure in Delhi is curbed and DIAL is forced to take up upgradation job in Delhi more seriously as per OMDA.